In this blog, Marsha Chan, "The Pronunciation Doctor," shares some of her professional development workshops and other ideas for language learning and teaching.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

How do you pronounce "bear"?

How do you pronounce "bear"?

The California
grizzly bear (Ursus californicus) is the official state animal of
California and is honored on the state flag. The last one, Monarch, killed in
1922, is on display at the California Academy of Sciences. Photo byPayton from
chicago, usa-Flickr,CC BY 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=408136

Thanks Marsha, how about bear/ˈbeɚ/, e is a single syllable here, is it /ɛ/? how do we pronounce this?

Good question! The sound /r/ colors, or affects, the
preceding vowel to a greater or lesser degree depending on a person's accent.
"Bear" is considered to be one syllable. Merriam-Webster Dictionary
shows the pronunciation in symbols in the following way.

The /r/ sound, although commonly
called a consonant, is quite different from other consonants. Like the sound
/l/, the English sound /r/ is known in phonetics as a liquid consonant,
or simply a liquid. Other consonants produce complete closures, for
example, the /t/ in tight and the /m/
in mom, or cause friction, such as the
/f/ in fife and the /ʧ/ in church. In contrast, a liquid requires a
movement of the tongue to produce just
a partial closure.

In most American dialects, the /r/ is pronounced after a
vowel sound, and as the tongue moves into the /r/ position, it pulls the vowel
in a different direction than when followed by another consonant. A schwa /ə/
sound is typically introduced before the tip of the tongue curls back.

This makes words like "flower" and
"flour" sound identical. Note how Merriam-Webster Dictionary shows
the pronunciation in symbols, with the schwa as an optional sound leading to
the /r/.

Besides the common, standard, or general American
English accent, there are also r-less dialects, where speakers don't pronounce
the final /r/ sound at all. They may use a schwa /ə/ sound
instead. A timely example is U.S. Senator from Vermont and candidate for
the Democratic nomination for U.S. President in the 2016 election, whose
voice we have been hearing often as he campaigns against former U.S. Secretary
of State and former Senator from New York Hillary Clinton to become the
Democratic nominee. The speech of Bernie Sanders demonstrates an r-less
accent of American English. If you watch the video Why Bernie Sanders tawks that way, published
by Vox, after viewing the brief introduction, scrub forward to 1:53 to focus on
the part about his systematic lack of final /r/ sounds. While I pronounce his surname Sanders /sændɚz/, he refers to himself as /sændəz/, without an /r/ sound.

Let's go back to the the word "bear", the word
that engendered this article. The Cambridge online Dictionary gives two
pronunciations, one American and the other British. Compare them
at the following link.